The Tiger
by Light1
Summary: After the war with the Hylden Janos is left alone to contemplate his fate. Can he come to terms with the curse.


**The Tiger**

Disclaimer: Legacy of Kain belongs people who are not me. I am making £0.00 out of this fic, it is written purely because I have a burning need to create. Although I would like to own Kain . . . then he'd be mine.

Rating: PG-13

Set: Pre any game. Post the Hylden war.

Authoressnote: Janos Audron on Everything.

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**The Tiger**

'_Little__lamb__who__made__thee__'_

'_Little lamb I'll tell thee'_

_The Lamb. William Blake. Songs of Innocence._

What kind of god could have allowed this to happen? Could allow his existence? Janos Audron perched on Ushtenhiem's church in the darkness. He did not fear being seen; the darkness covered him like a shroud and left only his silhouette to be seen. Surely if a mortal was to look up - which was very unlikely, since mortals have a habit of looking down - he would undoubtedly be dismissed as a gargoyle. It was ironic that he could hide among these stone daemons, like an angelic daemon among his stone brethren. He had in the past always believed his god to be fair, just and peaceful, keeping the cycle of life forever turning – the wheel – forever turning. But lately something disturbing had been fluttering around his mind. In his youth, he had been taught that God was everywhere, God made everything in the world, God knew everything and everything that happened was God's will. As a child, he had accepted these statements as truth and had never thought to question them. But now after, the war, he found himself scanning the old books, looking for answers to the questions the war had brought out of him.

If God had made, everything then had he made the Hylden too? If fate was God's will and everything that happened was fate, then wasn't the war fate? If God knew everything, wouldn't he have already known the result of the war? Had God known that his people would be damned? Had he willed the damnation of his own people? Janos shook his head hard, trying to will his thoughts to make sense. He had two options. He could accept the fact his God was not all-knowing and all-powerful, or he could accept the fact that their God had abandoned them long before they had been damned. He had been created to fall. The ancient race had been damned from the moment of their birth. His soul ached and for a while, he had refused to accept that thought. But the more he picked at it, the more he thought it over, the more likely it seemed. However, that just led to another question, one he really didn't want to know the answer to. What kind of god could have forged a creature such as himself or the Hylden? Creation was physical, laborious, and deliberate. Surely the awesome physical presence that both the Ancients and Hylden had held precluded the idea that such creation could have been in any way accidentally or haphazardly produced.

They had been created to fight each other, they had been created to kill and nature, like a work of art, must have reflected its creator in some way. Tensing his talons on the stone, he listened to it crack underneath him. So his God was just as blood-thirsty as the Hylden had been, just as blood-thirsty as he himself now was. His stomach rumbled in response to that thought and Janos looked over his shoulder at his wings, opening them, then closing them, listening to the feathers run against each other before spreading them fully to catch the wind. He smiled before slowly toppling off the cathedral. He couldn't help a rather mischievous grin as he heard the humans bellow scream at what must have been to them his sudden appearance. A lot of them ran for cover as his claws skimmed the dirt paths and he sailed back up into the sky. His own innocent enjoyment of their terror made him falter as he glided away from the town. What did the undeniable existence of evil and violence in the world tell about the nature of God? And what did it mean to live in a world where a being could at once contain both beauty and horror? He knew he was perfectly beautiful, and yet perfectly destructive, and tonight he knew he would prove both. If God had created everything, then hadn't he created humans too? Janos' mind reeled at the implications. The tigers and the lambs.

He had been thinking about this for a great many nights and had realised that every question he asked now was really just refining his first one. He was just elaborating on a single conception. It had taken a great many more nights' contemplation, but he had finally defined his first question. It was a question of creative responsibility and of will. If he could answer that question then perhaps the complexity of creation, the sheer magnitude of God's power, and the inscrutability of divine will would be a little clearer. He was gliding over a different village now, further south, lost in the forests. Almost subconsciously he folded his wings and dropped, opening them at the last moment when he felt his claws sink into human flesh. He knew just dropping silently from the sky was hardly fair or sporting to the prey, but tonight he was contemplating bigger things. He wasn't really surprised when the mortal didn't kick and scream; the creature was probably terrified stiff. Turning on the winds, he picked up speed and returned to the aerie. He dropped the mortal when he was a few feet above the balcony of his home and landed silently behind it. He had to admit he was a little confused now when the mortal didn't run or scream. Only then did he notice he'd taken a child, a boy on the cusp of manhood.

"What's your name?" His peculiar mood this evening made him ask this strange question.

"V . . . Vorador" came the shaky response.

**End**


End file.
